Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (40 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

 

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team had finished second behind Joe Namath's New York Jets, who in a few short weeks would be playing Johnny Unitas's heavily favored Baltimore Colts in the Super Bowl.
They did a mid-course correction, just to make absolutely sure they would hit the earth on target.
They did a television show. Held late in the afternoon on Christmas Day, this was a casual, hearty tour of the spacecraft, lasting over twenty minutes. Jim Lovell showed everyone how the Exer-Genie worked, Bill Anders ate a meal of cookies, orange juice, chowder and chicken, and Frank Borman described the computer and navigational system. As Borman later wrote, for this show they "hammed it up."
5
After the telecast the astronauts discovered another surprise waiting for them inside the command module food locker. The Whirlpool Corporation, which held the contract for manufacturing the bland dehydrated meals that the astronauts had been eating for four days, had decided to produce a special meal for Christmas Day. The foil packages had "Merry Christmas" labels on them and were wrapped by the women in the Whirlpool mail room with green and red fireproof ribbons. Inside was real turkey meat and gravy. "It was the best meal of the trip," Borman wrote years later.
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Ironically, NASA had planned to use these more advanced food packages on Apollo 8. Borman had vetoed the idea, however, in his effort to eliminate as many risks as possible. He did not see any reason to try out new methods of food preservation when he and his crew were taking so many other first-time risks. Hence, for seven days the astronauts had endured the same unpleasant dehydrated food that Borman had eaten on Gemini 7.
Also part of this Christmas meal were three small bottles of Coronet V.S.Q. brandy, sealed in fireproof containers. Borman, still the unwavering no-nonsense commander, ordered the astronauts to put these back unopened. He was fearful that if anything should go wrong the liquor would be blamed.
And then, something did go wrong. After eating their Christmas dinner Borman decided to take a nap. He left Anders in the pilot's seat and slipped below the couches to rest. Lovell meanwhile slid over to his navigational station and began doing some more navigational sightings.

 

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Jim, the navigational "concert pianist," started pressing buttons on the computer keyboard. He would sight a star in his telescope and tell the computer to align the spacecraft with it. The computer would then fire the thrusters to turn the capsule so that the chosen star was visible in Lovell's sextant. Lovell got so into this that he had the capsule swinging this way and that as he made star sighting after star sighting.
Suddenly Jim went "Whoa, whoa, whoa."
Mike Collins heard this and wondered what was going on. "Okay. Whoa, whoa. Standing by."
Lovell had accidently erased the navigational data from the computer. The inertial measuring unit (the I.M.U.), which Borman had insisted they leave on for the entire trip so that a manual realignment would not be necessary, no longer knew which way was up, and thought the spacecraft was instead back on launchpad 39A on Cape Kennedy. The computer, sensing that Apollo 8 was not oriented correctly, began firing thrusters. Anders, watching the systems, became alarmed as he saw the eight ball move more than he thought it should. The spacecraft was shifting drastically into a different position. He remembered Neil Armstrong's struggle to regain control of Gemini 8 when its thrusters had suddenly fired uncontrollably, and now wondered if this was happening to them. Anders fired a thruster to counteract.
The computer counteracted his action, and he counteracted the computer's counteraction. After a few seconds of battle Anders realized he didn't have a stuck thruster and let the computer stabilize the spacecraft to what it thought was a vertical position on the ground in Florida prior to launch.
Unfortunately, this orientation was useless for getting them home, since they no longer knew which way was up. This in turn made it impossible to align the capsule's heat shield properly when they reentered earth atmosphere, forty-one hours hence.
Not surprisingly, Frank Borman quickly awoke. While he and Anders sat and waited, Jim Lovell struggled to perform the manual realignment that Borman had hoped to avoid, resetting the I.M.U. so it knew exactly what attitude they were at that moment. Lovell looked out the window at the sun-washed sky and tried to identify a bright star in its constellation. Then he manually fired the thrusters to place this star in his sextant.

 

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With a field of view of only 1.8 degrees, however, the sextant could not show him the entire constellation. Lovell could only guess that he had the right star in sight. After ten minutes, with Borman and Anders growing increasingly anxious, he managed finally to align Rigel and Sirius. After another fifteen minutes of tweaking, he was able to reset the computer so that it once again knew the crafts orientation in space.
Borman asked Collins if there was "any danger that this might have screwed up any other part of memory that would be involved with entry?" Collins told him no, but that the ground would keep checking.
Jim "Shaky" Lovell looked at his two partners with a sheepish grin and said, "Don't sweat it."*
Borman went back to sleep. Anders took over the controls again. Collins asked if Bill wanted him to pipe up music from the tapes Anders had provided the ground. "Go ahead," he said.
Suddenly he was listening to a choir singing "Joy to the World." He floated there for two minutes, captivated by the music. The choir began its second song, "O Holy Night." Anders was so mesmerized that he forgot to change antennas. As the spacecraft rotated in its "barbecue mode," he needed to periodically flip a switch to maintain communications with the ground.
As the active antenna rotated behind the capsule, the choir's voices began to distort and warble into incomprehensibility. Anders felt a prickly feeling at the back of his neck, not aware at first what was happening. It seemed to him as if everything were suddenly grinding to a halt, as if the powerful religious music of his world had no power over the vast universe he was now traversing.
Then he remembered the antenna and flipped the switch. The music came back clear and in its full glory. To Anders, however, he would never again hear that music without a prickly feeling at the back of his neck, and without wondering at the validity of the words.
* Ironically, Lovell was forced to repeat this unplanned manual emergency procedure once again during Apollo 13. On that flight, an explosion forced them to once again turn off the I.M.U. to save power, and Lovell nd Fred Haise had to make a rough realignment using the sun and the earth. As Lovell notes today, "My training [on Apollo 8] came in handy!" See Lovell (1994), 283284.

 

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More time passed. As Ken Mattingly noted to Borman late that evening, "We're in a period of relaxed vigilance."
Borman responded, "We'll relax; you be vigilant."
Mattingly laughed. "That's a fair trade."
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On Thursday morning Jerry Carr opened the day with another daily news report, describing how, at the suggestion of Susan Borman, the families of the Apollo 8 astronauts had sent a prayer of thanksgiving to
Pueblo
Captain Lloyd Bucher and his wife. Carr also described how Bob Hope was once again entertaining the troops stationed in Vietnam, and how a so-called "gang" of high school teenagers in Ann Arbor, Michigan had gotten together secretly to cut through red tape and do good. Calling themselves the "Guerrillas for Good," Carr described how the youths had painted a bridge covered with obscenities, cleaned up trash along a river bed, and boarded up a condemned house.
In the afternoon, the astronauts gave their final in-space telecast, aiming the camera out the window to give the people of earth another view of themselves. It was obvious the home planet was slowly growing larger. The South American continent as well as Florida and the Caribbean could be seen under the swirls of clouds.
Watching this show from the control room was Marilyn Lovell and her two oldest children, Barbara and Jay. Barbara had been bothered the day before with what they all described as a twenty-four hour virus, though she felt well enough to come to mission control and see her father in space. In less than twenty-four hours the spacecraft would slam into the atmosphere, and Marilyn was beginning to feel increasingly tense once again as splashdown approached. It was the last hurdle she had to face.
Lovell stared at the approaching earth and couldn't help reflecting again on how tiny it seemed. "The earth looks pretty small right from here."
Bill Anders added his own thoughts. "As I look down on the earth here from so far out in space, I think I must have the feeling that the travelers in the old sailing ships used to have, going on a long voyage from home. And

 

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The televised view of an approaching earth, December 26, 1968
now that we're headed back, I have the feeling of being proud of the trip but still happy to be going home."
Anders pondered his home world. To him, this was the most significant thing he had discovered on this journey to another planet. While the goal had been to explore the moon, he had found that the earth was by far more interesting. He was once again struck by its fragility, its smallness, and its jewel-like preciousness.
Valerie Anders was home during this show. Seeing that steadily increasing earth and hearing Bill talk about coming home made her "feel really good." While the astronauts were spending much of their day packing

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